Field
Aspects described herein generally relate to antennas, including one or more tunable antennas.
Related Art
Wireless communication environments can use multi-antenna techniques that include multiple antennas at a transmitter, receiver, and/or transceiver. The multi-antenna techniques can be grouped into three different categories: diversity, interference suppression, and spatial multiplexing. These three categories are often collectively referred to as Multiple-input Multiple-output (MIMO) communication even though not all of the multi-antenna techniques that fall within these categories require at least two antennas at both the transmitter and receiver.
Carrier Aggregation (CA) is a feature of a mobile communication standard, such as, Release-10 of the 3GPP LTE-Advanced standard, which allows multiple resource blocks from/to multiple respective serving cells to be logically grouped together (aggregated) and allocated to the same wireless communication device. The aggregated resource blocks are known as component carriers (CCs) in the LTE-Advanced standard. Each of the wireless communication devices may receive/transmit multiple component carriers simultaneously from/to the multiple respective serving cells, thereby effectively increasing the downlink/uplink bandwidth of the wireless communication device(s). The term “component carriers (CCs)” is used to refer to groups of resource blocks (defined in terms or frequency and/or time) of two or more RF carriers that are aggregated (logically grouped) together.
There are various forms of Carrier Aggregation (CA) as defined by Release-10 of the LTE-Advanced standard, including intra-band contiguous (adjacent) CA, intra-band non-contiguous (non-adjacent) CA, and inter-band CA. In intra-band contiguous CA, aggregated component carriers (CCs) are within the same frequency band and adjacent to each other forming a contiguous frequency block. In intra-band non-contiguous CA, aggregated CCs are within the same frequency band but are not adjacent to each other. In inter-band CA, aggregated CCs are in different frequency bands.
Release-10 of the LTE-Advanced standard allows a maximum of five CCs to be allocated to a wireless communication device at any given time. CCs can vary in size from 1.4 to 20 MHz, resulting in a maximum bandwidth of 100 MHz that can be allocated to the wireless communication device in the downlink/uplink. The allocation of CCs to the wireless communication device is performed by the network and is communicated to the wireless communication device.
The exemplary aspects of the present disclosure will be described with reference to the accompanying drawings. The drawing in which an element first appears is typically indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.